METROPOLIS was released 90 years ago to this day. Using diagrams from a 1927 magazine, here is how they made those eye-popping/groundbreaking special effects

Oh "Metropolis," you had me at hello. I'll never forget the first time I saw the film. It was at film school and I had heard all the hoopla about this masterpiece being the granddaddy of all science fiction films, but I didn't realize just how incredible the effects director Fritz Lang created were until I saw the actual film. The sheer scope and vision to make such an astonishing film at such an early stage of cinema. How can we ever forget it? It's up there with "Citizen Kane" as the most influential movie of all-time. It gave people a visual rendering to all the sci-fi they were reading and dreaming of, but it also predicted how science fiction would feel, look, be dreamed-up for the next 90 years. Prophetic.